I took a few photos on a fishing trip on a friends camera about two years back. Having a copy of CS4 I thought I'd try and polish some of them up a little. The first photo is the original, I have tried to straighten it up and put the horizon further up the picture, I then played about with the adjustments to try and bring out the green on the trees and make it look a little dramatic. I'm not sure I've got it right and would like a more dramatic sky and reflection in the water.

You lost an awful lot of information in the second, processed image. Dark areas are closed up, and highlights are lost in bright areas.

If I had the original, and it was a raw file, there's a lot I could in the ACR production that comes with PS. Or better yet, with Lightroom 4, perhaps followed by a few tweaks in PS.

But, having only a .png (or .jpg) there are a few quick and dirty techniques that can be applied in PS to get you a pretty good image toot sweet.

In the first image I brought up the shadows and pulled down the bright areas with the Image->Adjustments->Shadows/Highlights. Just tried to pull out detail in the darks, and bright the brights down a bit, didnt' worry too much about overall contrast. Note that I make a copy of your original image in the Layers stack over at the right. Shadows/Highlights is a "destructive" editing technique and should be used sparingly, and you should always back up the original image on a separate layer before using it.

In the second image, I just added a Curves layer above the image to brighten it up a little.

If I wasn't so lazy, I could appled a lot of selection masks, luminance masks etc.

I personally always try to keep as much information as possible that is available from the image. Lots of shadow, lots of highlight detail, etc. There are other aesthetics that will sacrifice that kind of detail for dramatic effect, but that's not to my liking.

Tony, unfortunately no lightroom but I took your advice and wasn't so harsh with the crop, I also used Adobe Fireworks to play about with some of the levels and try to keep the sky looking quite dramatic.

Bill, I played about with the highlights and the shadows and think that really helped with the overall feel of the image. I'm still getting to grips with PS but think I'll start experimenting with layers like you say.

...I also used Adobe Fireworks to play about with some of the levels and try to keep the sky looking quite dramatic.

You realize "Fireworks" ain't a real image processing app, right? Just asking cause you really want to avoid the non-standard image processing apps out there. If it's raw, it's ACR or LR. If it ain't raw then quit screwing around with anything not named Photoshop. Ok?

Using the magic wand. The Magic wand isolates the areas you want to work on. Created a new layer for the sky and lake then I corrected the image with Levels, Vibrance, Hue Saturation and color balance.

To get the results that I got or better, you must use photoshop. As mentioned above, fireworks is not an image editing program.

Good luck TeamSamba

I am still learning. If anyone knows where my skills need to be sharpened, let me know which course to buy